Information gathered includes details of issues that interest them, preferred name, and can be highly personal, such as a constituent raising concern about child abuse due to personal experience, he said.

Jensen said the information had a legitimate purpose to identify particular policy interests and to track correspondence about constituents’ concerns.

On Sky on Thursday, Jensen said there were illegitimate uses of it such as “[where] it’s used for data mining for the Liberal party, for issues relating to trying to get votes, for fundraising and other reasons”.

Jensen told Guardian Australia illegitimate uses included profiling constituents and refusing to help them if they were not undecided or swinging voters.

According to Jensen, Liberal MPs were instructed to gather information about constituents’ voting intention by cold-calling them to survey them and entering results into Feedback. He said many did so but he refused.

When constituents later called for help, staff were told “if there’s not a vote in it, don’t do it”, Jensen said.

“They are told to brush them off – to say I can’t really help you and advise them to go back to Centrelink, immigration or whoever to deal with the issue.

“Some of these constituent matters take an awful lot of work. The party’s position is it’s wasted effort – they only see it in terms of their interest in winning votes. They want to help undecided voters, or soft Liberal or Labor voters, not hard Labor or Liberals.”

Asked if this meant Liberal voters would get less attention from a Liberal MP, Jensen replied: “Exactly, unless they’re members – they’re given significant attention – but if they are just strong Liberal voters then ‘don’t do too much’ is the message you get.”

Jensen said it was like pork-barrelling, the tendency for political parties to neglect safe Liberal and Labor seats and make big spending promises in marginal seats.

“I think it’s reprehensible [the attitude that] if you don’t think you can get political advantage you don’t bother. I’m there to help constituents.”

Jensen said: “Labor is no better. The company they use for Campaign Central doesn’t donate to the party but they use their tool in exactly the same way.”

Jensen complained that since he lost preselection he no longer had access to the Feedback database.

“The fact they pulled this from me, and the Liberal candidate will now have access to it, tells you everything you need to know about the extent to which it is a tool for constituents versus a tool for party political purposes,” he said.

Political donations: for voters, 2 July should be clean up Australia day

Read more

“The taxpayer paid for my constituents’ information to be put into Feedback and yet the Liberal party and Parakeelia think they can pull it from me.”

Jensen proposed removing political parties’ exemptions to privacy law, so that MPs and their offices were exempt but not political parties.

A Labor spokesman told Guardian Australia: “If the Liberal party is laundering taxpayers’ money into political donations then they need to explain that to the Australian people.”

The Greens leader, Richard Di Natale, said: “Revelations about the flow of money from Liberal MPs to Parakeelia and from Parakeelia to the Liberal party demand investigation”.

Speaking on AM on Thursday, Bishop said: “All parliamentarians receive a money to pay for office expenses including a small amount, I think it’s a modest amount, for software costs.”

“The Liberal party like the Labor party, do have a preferred provider for that software … I’m informed the payments we make to the service provider don’t generate a profit so they’re not donations and the operations of that service provider are entirely legitimate.”

Both the Liberal and Labor parties were contacted for comment regarding the use of voter-tracking software and alleged prioritising of undecided voters.